Richard Heinberg to Chase: Stop Funding a Planetary Dilemma!

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Richard Heinberg is the author of nine books, including The Party’s Over, Peak Everything, and the newly released Blackout. He exposes the tenuousness of our current way of life and offers a vision for a truly sustainable future. His letter to Jamie Dimon is below:

-Annie

Dear Mr. Dimon:

I am writing to respectfully request that you end JPMorgan Chase’s support of the coal industry. We urgently need to move away from our reliance on fossil fuels, and coal, first and foremost, because it is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. Over the last 150 years, the burning of coal and other fossil fuels has released so much carbon into the atmosphere that we are facing a planetary dilemma from global warming if we do not end our addiction to fossil fuels.

Not only is coal a major source of carbon pollution and a major contributor to climate change, but mountaintop-removal coal mining, which your institution is financing, is destroying the Appalachian Mountains. By investing in Massey Energy, you are an active participant in this destruction that has already has caused the catastrophic flooding of downstream communities, and the poisoning of drinking water for tens of thousands of people.

In fact, today, we are losing yet another mountain to the coal industry, Coal River Mountain. Its loss is not only iconic – it is the last intact mountain in the Coal River Mountain Range – but the site was to be the location of a 328-megawatt wind farm that would have provided 85,000 households in West Virginia with safe and renewable energy, 700 long-term green jobs, and $1.7 million in annual county tax revenue. Those jobs are being lost now, but the fact remains that investing in renewable energy, such as wind and solar, creates at least 2.8 as many jobs as coal. A clean-energy economy provides long-term jobs and a sustainable local economy that mountaintop-removal coal mining cannot.